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Quarantine – The Loners 1.10

Quarantine, The Loners is a book about a teenager called David and his younger brother Will. It’s Wills first year at Mckinley High School. The school year has just started and once school starts they find out that the school is contaminated with a disease which is fatal to anyone who isn’t a teenager, this means that all the teachers have been killed. The military reacts to this situation by closing the school in making sure no one can leave. Fast forward a year later and the school is divided into factions who fight for survival among their peers. David must do what it takes to protect Will and the ones he cares about even if means risking his own life. In order to protect him and his friends David start his own faction full of ‘loner kids’ who had nowhere to go before. David keeps finding himself in situations where he is being targeted by the two most powerful factions known as ‘Varsity’ and ‘The Pretty Ones’ who go out of their ways to hurt David and his crew.

The story of “Quarantine, The Loners” heavily focuses on a relationship aspect. Through out the entire book David is constantly being harassed by other factions as they she his new movement as a threat. David shows many moments of sacrifice and selflessness in the book. During the early chapters David has to hide Will in a small janitors closet while David goes out, risking his life to collect food and resources that are necessary for the two to survive. During one of Davids outings he finds a girl he doesn’t know getting chased by a member of varsity, out of selflessness David goes out of his way to save this girl. It is later to be revealed that this girl ‘Lucy’ was Wills old crush from before the school was encapsulated. Will begins to grow envious of David’s heroism because he wants to do more to impress the people around him. David and Lucy begin a relationship and Will’s envy only grows and he goes out of his way to sabotage Davids plans to help out others. At one stage David get kidnapped and Varsity attempts to lynch him, Will and the Loners make out a plan in order to save David and Will is very heroic. Unfortunately Will does not get the recognition for his noble act and his malice towards his brother intensifies.

While reading this novel I grew really fond of the character ‘David’ as he was the most relatable to me. The reason I found David relatable is because through out the book David constantly has to try and do the right thing in order to protect and gain the support of his peers. He demonstrates this when he spends his entire time in the quarantine protecting his brother only for Will to resent David. David is constantly trying to support, please and protect his little brother but he gets harassed because of his good will. For me I’ve had situations where I’ve been trying to do the right thing in order to satisfy my peers but it seemed no matter what I did someone was getting hurt. For me and David it seems that the best thing we could do is find the lesser of the two evils and make some sort of compromise. There were times where I had done as much as I can to maintain a friendship but everything I did seemed to upset them. David has to deal with the struggles of his brother going out of his way to ruin his relationships with other people and I could relate to this feeling. Something the Me and David both found out was that as soon as you find yourself in a position where you are no longer associated with the person we care about, they end up regretting their bitterness towards you and the relationship continues.

I think that the story did a good job at conveying how every character felt and it lead to me relating to a character like David but also I could put others in the shoes of other characters and see a different perspective as to how they might feel in these situations. It was interesting to see how a school might react to having to all of a sudden having to survive in dire conditions and I think that the concept of factions would be a fairly accurate thing that would happen as at school people tend to stick to their friends groups and they’re pretty much just like faction.